#player base

[askagamedev]

On premium non-lifestyle games: As a success metric for the developer/publisher, how much does playing a game matter compared to purchasing it? If I like a game's premise and decide to buy it, but have no intention to play it any time soon, is my purchase less valuable to them?

In terms of value, a player who buys the game but doesn't play it much is slightly less valuable to the publisher than a player who plays a lot.

The most valuable players are the evangelists, the hard core players who will engage with the community, make content about the game, and serve as volunteer brand ambassadors to the community at large. These are our cosplayers, fan artists, bloggers, youtubers, fan fic authors, and so on. These people not only play the game, but also help encourage others to play the game as well. These players go to conventions and events. This cohort typically comprises less than 1% of all players.

Most regular players fall in the second group, the engaged players. These are players who will play the game regularly, maybe they'll read the patch notes as they drop or engage with new content that appears. Some of them will buy merch. They're the ones who play regularly and keep coming back. They're the primary consumers of the post-launch content. We usually see around 20-40% of players fall into this category.

A good 60-70% or so of players will buy a premium game and quit before finishing it, let alone engaging with post-launch content. We value these players for their contribution, but they don't really factor too much into our post-launch content plans since they have clearly fallen off of the game. We primarily think about how we can convert more of these players to engaged players in future game releases, as well as what these players did engage with in the game and how we might lean more into that. You probably fall into this category.

At the very bottom of this list are the gamers who haven't played the game and comment on social media. We consider how we might sell a future game to them, but they have basically zero effect on our plans for content and very little for sequels because they have no investment in the game other than talking about it.

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[leagueoflegends-confessions]

As much as I've been complaining about Riot this year, I must say they've been working hard to acknowledge their player base. A lot of champs that are less played and prominent have gotten skins, they've made comics and expanded the universe, they've started working on battling the toxicity, and the client has gone from 15 giga in size to 12.

Artwork by bloodonspiral

[beating-beetle-heart]

Gotta let out a little Among Us rant.

I got imposter along with dark green. Not even two minutes in, green calls a meeting and says I killed someone (think Black, can't remember despite this being very recent).

I was pretty annoyed that my fellow imposter would throw me under the bus for his kill. I wasn't anywhere near them even. Nor had I killed anyone yet. Why not choose a crewmate?? Why your fellow team member? So, seeing as everyone decided to vote me off, and I was fairly annoyed and very tired since this was very late at night, I outted them before I got ejected.

Yeah, not my best move. Neither of us were good imposter team mates.

It did nothing on the livings end and green continues to kill. But, on my ghostly side, it got me a lot of hate. I get people would be annoyed at it. But they were being unreasonably toxic. It's a game bro, there's endless rounds.

Your existence is not being endangered by me outting someone on this singe round. It's not some personal, heart deep attack on your souls.

That's the thing bout this game! It's a great game. A lovely murder mystery. But the playerbase is extremely toxic to the point where I can hardly go one, maybe two rounds without some idiot being a rude jackass for no reason. Or some little kid who thinks it's funny to be a complete perv the entire time. The game is good, but the experience would be a lot more enjoyable if these things didn't happen 24/7. The entire player base isn't like this, but nearly all of it from my experience.

[groundrunner100]

Destiny’s future is looking bright. 😎

[askagamedev]

Hi there. How important is number of players to an MMO from a player-facing perspective? What's a good minimum number?

Today we'll act as system designers and break down your question into a set of smaller questions that are easier to answer. First, let me establish this as the premise - a MMOG service is like an all-you-can-eat buffet that's open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year (minus server maintenance times). The expectation from players is that they will be able to log on to the game at any time of day, and play without having to wait for too long.

We can break down the sort of gameplay engagement from players into two buckets for this - solo gameplay and gameplay that requires other players. For solo gameplay, we're good - the game service automates all of the NPC spawning and loot table rolling for us, so all of the solo content should be fine on its own. For content dependent on other players, we need to consider the ways in which players can interact with each other within the scope of the MMOG's gameplay systems. These activities can include things like:

Player to Player Trade (direct trade, auction house, etc.)

PVP Group content (e.g. Battlegrounds)

PVE Group content (e.g. Dungeons and Raids)

Zone/Faction PVP participation

PVE World Events

We can break further break these down into two smaller buckets - real time community needs and asynchronous community needs. 

If a player logs in during their preferred play time and can't find other players to run a dungeon with or finds the PVP zone to be empty in real time, they aren't going to have fun. This is the "real time community needs" bucket - a player needs other players right now to play with. To keep these systems from feeling frustrating, we need enough players engaging with these gameplay systems such that the wait time is not too high (i.e. usually < 5 minutes or so). We can usually mitigate the frustration by allowing players to engage with other game content while waiting for their queue to pop, populating empty slots with bots for queues that take too long, and so on. 

Similarly, if a player logs in and the auction house is empty or the faction-wide quest hasn't advanced enough since last week, the player isn't having fun. This is the "asynchronous community needs" bucket - a player needs other players to have engaged with the game within the past N hours/days/etc. and not immediately. For these systems, we have a much longer time frame where we just need to make sure enough players over a period of hours/days/weeks/etc. will engage with the system to keep players from feeling frustrated. This can also be supplemented by generating content for players (e.g. having a bot auto-sell items on the auction house if there aren’t enough of those items to buy).

Usually, this means we want around at minimum of around 10 x (number of players per group) players seeking real time group content at any given time in order to do the matchmaking within a reasonable time frame. This also doesn’t include further subdivisions among the player base (e.g. waiting for a tank to queue, or how level 20 players and level 100 players probably aren’t going to be seeking the same group content). For asynchronous content needs, you need enough players to engage over that time frame (usually a few hundred at minimum) to keep things stocked and working. Exact numbers will, of course, vary with factors like player turnover rate, game length, backfilling players who leave games, mitigation features like bots, etc.

PS. If this talk about gameplay time frames reminds you of [primary/secondary/tertiary gameplay loops], you earn a cookie for thinking like a game designer.

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[askagamedev]

Is the only value seen in continued player engagement "we expect X% people to participate in ongoing monetization" or are there other factors that indicate to investors how a high active player count is good for business?

There are many good reasons why we want to keep players playing, even those who haven’t (yet) monetized.

First, converting an existing free player to a paying player is far easier (and cheaper) than acquiring new users. New user acquisition is incredibly expensive today; getting new players to buy or download your game faces incredibly fierce competition which drives enormous marketing costs just so that players who haven’t tried our product might give it consideration between the other competing games coming out this month.

The longer people play, the more likely they are to engage in monetization. I personally didn’t monetize Pokemon Go for over a year while playing it regularly. I and my partner both eventually spent on it. From a user perspective, it made a lot of sense - “I’ve been playing this game for a year and I’ve been having fun with it, I should kick them a few bucks at the very least” is a much more persuasive argument than “I just started this game and they are demanding my money already, ew”. Just because a player is (still) not a paying player doesn’t mean they never will be. We probably just haven’t found the right thing to offer them at the right price point yet. 

Beyond just monetization, however, exist the intangible benefits of having a sufficiently large player base. If we build the game right, the players will provide content for each other. Somebody needs to populate the auction house with things you want to buy, buy the things you want to sell, and keep the economy going. Somebody has to craft the things you want. Somebody needs to fill out your team and the opposing team so you can have a match. Somebody needs to join your dungeon/raid group. Somebody needs to be in ranked queue so that you can improve your ELO score. Somebody needs to create additional content for the game to foster a real sense of community - fan-arting, theorycrafting, RPing, mod-making, cosplaying, streaming, blogging, youtubing, and so on.

Having a healthy and self-sustaining community allows us to spend our resources more on content creation and user retention than it does on user acquisition. If we can’t maintain critical mass in our community size, the game becomes a ghost town and even the paying players will leave. Nobody wants to keep playing a dead game, even if they’ve spent on it before. 

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